Water

 

I decided to give you a visual idea of my garden with pictures of my corn at the top and tomatoes at the end. With the rest of the sandwich,  I’ll catch you up on activities on the farm. Of which there are many!

First, the chickens. For someone who doesn’t eat many eggs, I spend a whole lot of time catering to these fowl. Now that Dan is up here and busily re-piping the entire farm’s water system (more later), I have been busier than ever. Why? Because Dan cannot keep opening and shutting the paddock gates as he tools around toting pipes, etc. They stay open. The result of this is that the chickens are free to resume their old behaviors and wander at will.

This means that I have to chase them down, round them up and return them to home base. I wouldn’t bother normally but the girls are terrified of the chickens (for absolutely no reason) and scream the place down if one of our feathered friends wanders within eyesight.

Last night we got a terrible scare.  I had forgotten about the nomadic birds since over time I had trained them to stay in their own 2 paddocks (until our new open gate policy). So here I am up in my room and hear these piercing shrieks. I race out of there, stumble on my stairs, catch myself with a now wrenched arm and race around the house searching for whichever grandchild was dying horribly.

What I found was 2 girls sitting on tricycles screaming their heads off. I also found two bemused chickens standing some distance away, heads cocked, trying to figure out what was going on. I still haven’t recovered.

All this for chickens who have slacked off on the egg production front. I tried everything. More feed; less feed; different feed. More water, changed twice a day, etc. We finally got smart and called the breeder who said they slacked off when it got hot! Who knew? I burned up the internet trying to discover what was wrong but nowhere did I hear about hot weather slowing production. Cold weather, yes. Hot weather, no. Learn something every day. Or in this case, every few months.

So that’s the chickens. The water system here has left a great deal to be desired. This used to be one large farm which someone quartered into lifestyle blocks (Kiwi for farmettes). So the tanks, piping, etc. has been haphazard to say the least. Dan has been working diligently for 3 years to replace garden hoses with proper piping. He has also been trying to find one stubborn leak but no luck yet. Along the way, he has found numerous other leaks and repaired them.

Now that it is the long vacation and Dan’s first time off since he moved here, he decided that he would rather play with water than go to the beach and be in water. This was triggered by discovering that the pipe to the paddock across our driveway was just a garden hose buried under the gravel. He is now digging it up, retrenching it, and laying proper pipe. He is also putting in new water troughs, new valves, etc.

He found time to refine the market garden watering system for which I am very grateful. And just in time since the drought should be along any time now. But for the time being, I am relishing watering a garden with actual plants. I have a pumpkin, numerous corn, and tomatoes. We will glide lightly over the many vegetables that were sacrificed to the well-being of some rat clan. Yes, Dan found a rat tunnel from outside the garden in and I have played Sherlock and assumed that that is where all my seedlings went. I am only a tad bitter. Make that pretty darn bitter. I hate rats!

Roma Tomatoes